The doctrine that the Earth was of unlimited age allowed geologists
to explain any phenomenon not by the laws of physics, but by
“reckless drafts on the bank of time”. - (Chamberlin, 1899).

The Origins of Modern
Geology[1]
By George GrinnellKRONOS I-4 Winter 1976

Foreword

"I think any argument from such a reported radical as
myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the geologist Charles
Lyell on May 3, 1832, "would only injure the cause, and
I therefore willingly leave it in better hands."

Charles Babbage (1792 - 1871) was Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics (1828-39) at the time, a dabbler in geology,
theology, and manufacturing, and had recently made an
unsuccessful bid for a seat in parliament. In
1837, he would publish his The Ninth Bridgewater
Treatise, an attack on the theology of the Anglican
establishment, and in 1851, he would carry the attack
into the Tory camp in his
Reflections on the Decline of Science in
England, the purpose of which was to argue that
wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science
policy and were discriminating against socially less
well positioned scientists, who were more deserving of
support.

Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875), to whom he was writing, had
just published the second volume of his
Principles of Geology (volume I, 1830, volume II,
1832; and volume III, 1833), a work written in support
of political liberalism—although ostensibly it was an
objective work in science free from any political
implications. In his letter of May 3 to Lyell,
Babbage was explaining why he would not write a
favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the
Whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin and
Mantell, did not want the public to know that that which
was being promoted as objective truth was little more
than thinly disguised political propaganda.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate what Babbage
means by the words "radical" and the word "cause," when
he writes, as quoted above: "I think any argument from
such a reported radical as myself would only injure the
cause, and I therefore leave it in better hands."
The first part of this paper investigates the political
implications of early 19th Century Geology. The
second probes into the nature of Babbage's and Lyell's
"cause."

The Political Implications of Early 19th Century
Geology

In 1807 Humphrey Davy wrote to his friend William Pepys:
"We are forming a little talking geological dinner club,
of which I hope you will be a member." Of the
original thirteen members, four were doctors, one an ex-unitarian
minister. Two were booksellers. Another,
Comte Jacques­Louis, had fled the French Revolution.
Four were Quakers, and two, William Allen and Humphrey
Davy, were independently wealthy amateur chemists.
Only one, George Greenough, had any training in geology
or mineralogy—having paid a visit to the Academy at
Freiberg some years earlier along with Goethe—but he
did not pursue the subject for a living by any stretch
of the imagination. He was a member of Parliament.
Indeed, what is extraordinary about the London
Geological Society is that none of the original members
were geologists. "The little talking dinner club,"
as Davy put it, was a club for gentlemen given to talk,
not to hammering rocks.

The following year 26 Fellows of the Royal Society
joined, including Joseph Banks, the President of the
Royal Philosophical Society, and the year after the
number of members had jumped to 173. The "little
talking dinner" club concept became unfeasible;
apartments were rented instead. There was talk of
publishing transactions, and Sir Joseph Banks, fearing
that the Geological Society would soon grow bigger than
his prestigious and ancient Royal Philosophical Society,
resigned in protest. By 1817, only ten years after
its founding, the Geological Society had more than 400
members, and in 1825 it was incorporated with a
membership of 637.

The founding and early growth of the London Geological
Society is noteworthy for a number of reasons.
Earlier scientific societies, like the Royal Academy in
France and the Philosophical Society in London, had had
a much broader base. There had been a few abortive
attempts to start specialized scientific societies in
chemistry and in botany, but they had come to nothing.
The Geological Society of London was really the first
specialized scientific society, and its early growth was
unprecedented—in fact, very difficult to account for,
especially when one recalls that its early members were
almost all doctors, lawyers and members of Parliament;
the Reverend William Buckland was Dean of Westminster,
and Sir Roderick Murchison was an independently wealthy
retired Army Officer.

That is not to say that there were no persons in England
actively engaged in what we would now consider to be
geological pursuits, for, indeed, England was at the
time going through a crash program of canal building and
mine exploration and was about to enter the railroad
age; but one is hard pressed to find these working
geologists on the membership list. William Smith,
for instance, the most famous drainage engineer of the
age, who discovered the technique of correlation of
strata by means of fossils and is generally mentioned in
modern geological texts as the key geologist of the era,
was not invited to join the London Geological Society.
Perhaps he was too busy doing geology to have time to
talk about it, but if the truth be told, the London
Geological Society was a group of talking amateurs
whose interest in geology was for its theological and
political implications, not for its application to
mining and canal digging. These theological and
political implications were crucial to the social
stability of England and were therefore by no means
irrelevant to the early history of geology.

The term "geology" had only recently been introduced by
the Swiss diluvialist, de Luc. In the Medieval
University curriculum one finds no place for the study
of the earth, which was deemed corrupt, a product of the
devil and therefore not worth studying. Geometry,
numerology, harmony and astronomy better reflected the
wisdom of God than did the study of things of this
world, the Medieval Catholics believed, following Plato,
but the Protestant Reformation had changed all that.
Between the years 1680 and 1780 some five hundred books
and articles were published on geology, ranging from
Bishop Burnet's popular Sacred Theory of the
Earth (which ran through seven editions between 1681
and 1753) to J. T. Klein's scholarly monograph on a
single class of fossils, Dispositio
Echinodermatum
(1732). The Protestants were keen to demonstrate
that God's handiwork was as easily seen in this world as
in the next, and particularly they were eager to
demonstrate the literal truth of a Bible which declared
that God had not only created all the creatures of the
earth, but had also brought down the Deluge to punish
man for his sins.

Shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the
Catholics were driven out of England, a rash of works
appeared reconciling the book of Genesis
with the new research into nature. The most
successful of these was John Woodward's Essay towards
a Natural History of the Earth,
in which he explained the stratigraphic sequence of
rocks by supposing that during Noah's flood, all the
surface rocks of the earth had been dissolved by the
sea, later to be gradually precipitated out into the
stratigraphic sequences which now comprise the secondary
formations. Because the Woodwardian idea preserved
the theme of Genesis that the flood was caused by divine
decree to punish men for their sins, it was favorably
received by the Anglican Church and later became, at the
hands of the Tories, a major bulwark in their defense of
monarchy. In 1728, the Woodwardian professorship
was founded at Cambridge, the first academic recognition
of the field of what is now called "geology." Woodward's
ideas were articulated not only in England, but also on
the continent-particularly in the popular classes of
Abraham Gotlob Werner at Freiberg later in the century,
where Greenough, von Buch, Maclure, Jamieson, Berger,
and most of the other founders of geology studied.

In the pursuit of Woodwardian geology, a number of
anomalies occurred—in particular, a lack of correlation
between new and old world strata as well as overlays of
basalt and granite in what were supposed to be secondary
deposits. As a result, Leonard von Buch and
Georges Cuvier modified the early diluvial theory into a
more general catastrophic theory of the earth in which
the earth was seen as not having suffered one
catastrophe, but numerous catastrophes, of which the
Deluge was but the most recent example. To deny
catastrophism altogether was to deny the truth of the
Bible, and hence the theological implications of early
geology were quite clear.

In 1673 Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin of France,
had drawn up his arguments in favor of kingship into a
treatise, Politics drawn from thevery Words of Holy Scripture, in which he argued
that monarchy was the most common, the most ancient, and
the most natural form of government. The
key word there was "natural." He argued that
nature provided evidence of being ruled by a divine
monarch, God himself, King of the Universe, and that a
King was then emulating God when he ruled with absolute
authority: "Thus we have seen monarchy takes its
foundation and pattern from paternal control, that is
from nature itself," Bishop Bossuet writes. The
British spokesman for monarchy, Robert Filmore, echoed
Bossuet's words. Monarchy was natural, because all
of nature was ruled by a divine absolute monarch, God
himself.

In the course of the 18th century, as democratic
sentiments grew not only in America but throughout all
of Europe, the political theory of Bossuet and Filmore
was seriously challenged. John Locke in his
Treatises on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau
in his Discourses[2]
argued against the naturalness of monarchy in favor of a
social contract theory of government. But to prove
that monarchy was unnatural, it was necessary to prove
that the Bible's description of the Deluge was
inaccurate; that God had not created the animals and
plants of this earth and that he had not introduced
catastrophes to punish man for his sins, for these were
the biblical and geological models upon which
monarchical theory was based. In 1789, on the eve
of the French Revolution, accompanied by Erasmus Darwin
and later by Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Simon LaPlace,
the Scottish liberal geologist, James Hutton, published
his Theory of the
Earth, in which he attempted to demonstrate that
Nature was not governed by a divine monarch, but by
fixed geological laws of volcanic uplift and erosive
weathering. Hutton's friend, Adam Smith, was at
the same time arguing in favor of a laissez-faire
economic policy, in which paternal monarchical power was
again eliminated in favor of a free-ranging liberalism.

"Some Judicious persons, who were present at Geneva
during the troubles which lately convulsed that city,"
the Reverend William Paley writes in a counter attack
against the new liberalism in his
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy
(5th edition, corrected 1793), "thought they perceived
in the contentions there carrying on, the operation of
that political theory which the writings of Rousseau,
and the unbounded esteem in which these writings are
held by his countrymen, had diffused amongst the people.
Throughout the political disputes," he goes on, "that
have within these few years taken place in Great
Britain, in her sister Kingdom, and in her foreign
dependencies, it was impossible not to observe, in the
language of party, in the resolution of popular
meetings, in debate, in conversations, in the general
strain of those fugitive and diurnal addresses to the
public, which such occasions call forth, the prevalency
of the ideas of civil authority which are displayed in
the work of Mr. Locke. Such doctrines," he
continues, "are not without effect; and it is of
practical importance to have the principles from which
the obligation of social union, and an extent of civil
obedience are derived, rightly explained and well
understood. " Paley then went on to explain them
not only in the ensuing 567 pages of his Moral and
PoliticalPhilosophy but also in the two volumes of a much
longer work on Natural Theology in which the
cosmological foundations of monarchy were once again
reiterated.

The "cause," then, to which Babbage was referring when
he wrote Lyell ("I think any argument from such a
reported radical as myself would only injure the cause")
was that of discrediting Paley and the other Tory
Monarchists through an attack on its geological and
theological foundations.

The Cause

After the Napoleonic Wars, England had fallen into a
severe depres­sion. Governmental demands for
military supplies ceased, and there was no market for
British goods overseas. To add to the distress and
general unemployment nearly 400,000 troops were
demobilized with no place to go. In order to protect the
British farmer from imports of cheap grain, the corn
laws were instituted in 1815 preventing the import of
grain until the price had reached 80 shillings a
quarter, a price so high that laborers were starving
without being able to pay it. Although the corn
laws were passed to protect the British farmer, they had
a devastating effect on British Industry and on the
towns of the industrial midlands. High food prices
drove not only the workers into starvation, but also
small businesses into bankruptcy. The Tory
solution to the problem was to advise the lower classes
not to breed so copiously. Still the towns of the
industrial mid­lands continued to grow—mostly, as it
turns out, from an influx of the younger sons and
daughters of poor farmers. Manchester, for
instance, was a small town of 4,000 in 1688. A
century later it was ten times that size, and by the
time Lyell published his
Principles of Geology, it was approaching half a
million, most of whose inhabitants lived in wretched
conditions. Malthus classified towns like
Manchester along with wars, famines and plagues as a
natural check on the population because the death rate
was so high.

On August 16, 1819, a crowd of unemployed, underpaid,
and under­fed inhabitants of Manchester gathered at St.
Peter's field to hear a speech on Parliamentary Reform
and repeal of the corn laws. The local militia
from the countryside, fearing a rebellion, attempted to
arrest the speaker. In the fight that ensued,
several were killed and many injured. The
monarchist Tory government instituted the "Six Acts,"
which curtailed the right of free speech and forbade the
training of persons in the use of arms. England
was on the verge of revolution-the liberal industrial
midlands versus the Tory monarchists; but the memory of
the French Revolution was still fresh among the middle
class. They wanted reform in Parliament, not
riots, but to reform Parliament meant answering Paley's
arguments, and this entailed destroying Paley's Natural
Theology.

Paley had argued that sovereignty descends from God to
the King; the people are his subjects. Because
Parliament is an advisory body, if the king is content
with its advice, then there is no need to reform it.
The fact that Parliament did not represent the present
distribution of people in England, Paley argued, was
irrelevant since sovereignty did not stem from the
people to begin with. Sovereignty descended from
God.

Paley's arguments were amazingly effective. His
treatise on Moral and Political Philosophy,
in which he argued that "it is the will of God that the
established government be obeyed," was required for
memorization (one had to know his basic argument)
before students could graduate from Oxford or Cambridge.
The only way the liberals from the midlands could get
Parliament reformed was to demonstrate that the
scientific foundations of Paley's natural theology were
false, and this meant destroying diluvial geology and
catastrophism.

In 1825, Lyell's liberal cohort George Poulett Scrope
(1797 - 1876) published his Considerations on
Volcanos in which he transformed the arguments of
the Tories: every time they ascribed a natural event to
God, Scrope ascribed the same event to a volcano,
thereby attempting to revive the geological theories of
James Hutton. So perfect were the laws of volcanic
uplift and erosion which God had created at the
beginning of time eons ago, Hutton and Scrope argued,
that no more had been seen of God since, nor was there
any need of him to run the affairs of the universe any
more than was there need of a king to interfere with the
natural and intrinsic laws of economics and of society.

Scrope's book was too radical for the London Geological
Society at that time, and it was dismissed without a
hearing. Scrope, the son of a wealthy London
merchant, bought himself a seat in Parliament and
pursued the cause by more direct means. But
without a cosmological proof that monarchy was unnatural
and that sovereignty belonged to the people, the
liberals remained relatively powerless.

Undaunted by Scrope's failure, the young Whig lawyer
Charles Lyell now tried his hand at destroying the
geological foundation of monarchical theory. In
his
Principles of Geology he took a much more subtle
line than had Scrope. In the 100-page introduction
to the Principles, Lyell argued not so much that
the diluvial theory was wrong, as that it was
mythological and impeded the "progress" of geology.
In the first volume he went on at great length
concerning the forces of erosion and the effects of
volcanic uplift in what was a brilliant avoidance of all
evidence of catastrophism. It was just what the
moderates were looking for. They rallied around
Lyell and elected him secretary first, and then
president of the Geological Society.

"By espousing you," Scrope wrote to Lyell on April 12,
1831, "the conclave have decidedly and irrevocably
attached themselves to the liberal side, and sanctioned
in the most direct and open manner the principal things
advocated. Had they on the contrary made their
election of a Mosaic geologist like Buckland or
Conybeare, the orthodox would have immediately taken
their cue from them, and for a quarter of a century to
come, it would have been heresy to deny the excavations
of valleys by the deluge and atheism to talk of anything
but chaos have lived before Adam. At the same time
I have a malicious satisfaction," Scrope continues, "in
seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new doctrine
upon compulsion rather than from taste and shall enjoy
their wry faces as they find themselves obliged to take
it like physics to avoid the peril of worse evils.
I feel some satisfaction in this."

In this day and age when geology is far removed from
religion and politics and when political issues are
settled by election rather than at meetings of
geological societies, it is difficult for us to
understand the extent to which the social shift in world
view which took place not only in geology but in
astronomy and in natural history was related to the
Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of
the far more general shift in world view from
paternalism to liberalism, but the persons responsible
for engineering this shift were very conscious of what
they were doing. "It is a great treat to have
taught our section-hunting quarry men, that two thick
volumes may be written on geology without once using the
word A stratum," Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29,
1832, after Lyell's second volume appeared. "If
anyone had said so five years back, how he would have
been scoffed at." Just as the conservatives had
refused a hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the
liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into
power. The stronghold of catastrophism lay in a
stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities, to
say nothing of massive conglomerates, told of
wide-ranging geological disasters in the past.
Lyell, like Scrope before him, simply suppressed the
evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines, and
once he was voted into power, the catastrophists found
it increasingly difficult to publish their research.

The liberal takeover of the geological society and the
suppression of evidence favoring the catastrophist
position did not come about over-night. Rather
there was a slow assimilation of catastrophist data
until there was virtually nothing left to the theory as
a whole. When, in 1839, Louis Agassiz attempted to
argue in favor of catastrophism with his theory of ice
ages, the uniformitarians simply adopted all his
evidence, but reinterpreted it in uniformitarian terms.
Thus the data did not change, but the Gestalt by which
that data was organized and given coherence was
transformed from catastrophism to uniformitarianism,
just as the social structure of England was changed from
Tory Paternalism in which sovereignty descended from God
down to the King, to the new liberalism in which
sovereignty ascended up from the people through
Parliament to its ministers.

Ironically enough, the political battle which underlay
the catastrophist-uniformitarian debate of 1832 is now
long over, but owing to the paradigmization of science,
the uniformitarian Gestalt is still assiduously
cultivated at universities and in professional
geological societies. The A cause" for which
Babbage, Scrope, and Lyell were fighting is now long
since over, and we should feel free to look again at the
geological evidence itself, which, if the truth be told,
provides ample evidence for catastrophism, as it always
has.

Afterword

In 1905, Physics had been in a dilemma; some of the
evidence from optics indicated that light moved in
waves, other evidence indicated that it moved in
particles. The two concepts seemed contradictory,
but Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were able to show
mathematically that the two concepts were actually
complementary and provided us with a fuller picture of
reality if we accepted them both. Geology is today
perhaps in the same situation. We have inherited
from our ancestors the idea that either catastrophism
must be correct or uniformitarianism must be correct but
not both. The reason they put this either/or
proposition was political. Either sovereignty
belonged to God and the King, or it belonged to the
people, it could not belong to both; therefore Geology
had either to go with the Tories to catastrophism, or to
the liberals with uniformitarianism; it could not go
both ways. Today we no longer have to worry about
that; from the evidence of Geology, it seems quite clear
that both theories are correct. The normal course of
events is indeed as Lyell describes it: gentle uplift
and slow erosion, but there is also ample evidence that
Velikovsky is correct as well and that the earth has
indeed been subject to severe catastrophes as he has so
convincingly argued in his
Earth in Upheaval.

In this paper I have attempted to make five major
points: first, the London Geological Society, which gave
birth to the uniformitarian paradigm, did not originally
consist of a group of practicing field geologists, but
was comprised of gentlemen, members of Parliament,
clergymen and lawyers who were primarily concerned with
the political and theological implications of Geology at
the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 when the
concept of monarchical sovereignty was being challenged
by the Whigs and defended by the Tories. Second,
that the London Geological Society had been split into
two camps with the Tory catastrophists prevailing before
1832 and liberal Whigs, under the leader­ship of Lyell,
Scrope and, later, Darwin, taking over in the second
quarter of the century. Third, that
"uniformitarianism" was promoted by the liberals as part
of "the cause" to undermine the theoretical foundations
of monarchy and was not derived from field research.
Fourth, because the Tories were using repressive tactics
in politics to prevent the reform of Parliament, the
social tension spilled over into the geological debate
causing the intense interest in geology in the 1820's
and 1830's and the exponential growth of the newly
founded London Geological Society. The liberals,
by seizing control of the London Geological Society
before the Reform Bill was passed, presaged what was
soon to follow in the political arena. And, fifth,
once in control, the liberals attempted to cement their
hegemony by repressing the catastrophists and by
assimilating their data. In the ensuing years of
the 19th century, geology became fully professional and
dogmatic. It became a scientific heresy to believe
in catastrophic theory; and many years later, the
reaction of the scientific community was one of
instinctive repression, not because Velikovsky was
wrong, but because it basically feared that he may be
right.

[1].
This paper was first presented in May of 1974 at the
Symposium titled Velikovsky and Cultural
Amnesia held at the Univ. of Lethbridge (Alberta).

[2]. The "Discourses" are three: "A Discourse on the Arts
and Sciences...... A Discourse on the
Originality of Inequality," and "A Discourse on Political Economy."